


Fade to Black

by IndigoStarblaster



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe
Genre: AU, F/M, I'm really sorry, first attempt, thought experiment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-02
Updated: 2012-11-02
Packaged: 2017-11-17 14:35:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/552624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IndigoStarblaster/pseuds/IndigoStarblaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While writing analysis, I started wondering, “What if Tony Stark had not figured out the new element after all?” and this is what resulted. It begins about halfway through the final battle in <em>Iron Man 2</em> and takes it through to the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fade to Black

**Author's Note:**

> This was my first attempt at fic in this fandom and can't really be dignified with the title of 'story'. I dithered about whether to put it on AO3 and finally decided I would so I'd have all my fic attempts in one place. 
> 
> I'm sorry it's so sad.

“Mr. Stark. You have your best friend back,” Nathalie — or Natasha, or whoever she is — reports through the holographic interface.

 _Thank god_. “Thank you, Agent Romanov.” Tony closes his eyes for a moment, exhausted, and consciously relaxes his grip on Rhodey’s armor. He stays on his knees beside his friend. His hands are trembling, a little.

Nathalie/Natasha continues, in a carefully neutral voice, “Your blood toxicity level…”

“Yeah.” The taste of defeat is still bitter in his mouth. He had allowed himself to hope, when S.H.I.E.L.D. showed up, talked him down from the donut, given him the box of his dad’s most secret stuff. But it had been useless.  ”I think I’ve got maybe an hour left–”

“An hour?” Pepper’s voice and face unexpectedly appear on the interface. “What do you mean, an hour? What’s going on?”

“Hey, it’s you.” Tony tries for casual. ” I’ve been meaning to, uh, I’ve actually been trying really hard…for me…”

“Tony, what’s going on, what are you–”

“Tony, you have incoming.” Natasha cuts them off. “Looks like the party’s coming to you.”

“Got it. Pepper, I’ll talk to you after. Promise.” Before she can reply he cuts off her channel. He feels a twinge of guilt, pushes it away. He looks down at the War Machine, still dark and unmoving. Flips up his visor, taps on Rhodey’s. “Rhodey. Wake up, buddy. I need you.”

A groan from within the depths of the battered metallic grey helmet, and then Rhodey’s visor flips up. He groans again. “Argh. You can have the suit back, man.”

“No can do. We’ve got incoming. Can you stand?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

Tony is about to extend his hand to help, when he realizes his legs aren’t obeying him. He quickly flips down his visor; luckily, Rhodey is too busy trying to get to his own feet to notice. His gut spasms and he grits his teeth against a wave of nausea.  ”Jarvis, I need a hit.”

Sharp pain at the base of the neck. “Twenty cc’s lithium dioxide. Injecting now.” Jarvis’ calm voice helps as much as the chemical burning its way down his spine and outwards.

Tony takes a deep breath — he hadn’t even noticed how difficult breathing had become — and manages to stand up. “Rhodey, what’s the call?”

Rhodey is scanning the little bit of parkland they managed to crash into. ”Tony, we’ve got to get to high ground. We stay here in the kill box, we’re gonna die.”

Before Tony can reply, before they can move, Vanko’s drones land, one by one, all around them. Rhodey’s visor flips down. Tony wearily assumes a battle stance. Concussive blasts tear the clearing apart. Despite his attempts to concentrate, Tony loses focus during the battle over and over again, leaving the Iron Man armor to rely on Jarvis’ combat algorithms several seconds at a time. There is surreal comedy as Jarvis announces each sequence: “‘Chop-socky’ protocol, engaged. ‘Having a bad day’ protocol, engaged. ‘Too many of these assclowns’ protocol, engaged.”

In a moment of clarity, Tony sees an opportunity to use high-output lasers. He calculates the trade-off — every spike in demand for more power from the arc reactor paid for in minutes off his rapidly dwindling life expectancy — and decides it’s worth it. “Rhodey, get down!” Rhodey promptly drops flat to the ground, and Tony activates the lasers, spins to send the light in all directions, dropping the remaining drones where they stand.

“Nice.” Rhodey stands up. “You should lead with that next time.”

“It was kind of a one-shot.” Tony checks his blood toxicity level. Ninety percent of the way to irreversible damage to his heart, liver, lungs, central nervous system. Eighteen minutes left.

“Tony.” Rhodey has flipped up his visor, looking a little embarrassed. Tony automatically flips his up in response. “Listen. I’m sorry. I should have trusted you.”

Tony can’t say, _You did exactly what I wanted you to do_. Or, _I’m dying_. Not even with eighteen…seventeen…minutes left. Finally: “You did the right thing. You always do.”

Rhodey is even more embarrassed, but then Natasha’s voice comes over the suit intercoms. “Heads up. Another drone is coming your way.” Pause. “This one is different. Its repulsor signature is significantly higher.”

The roar of repulsors above them makes them both look up. Ivan Vanko, unbelievably large and twice as ugly in armor of his own, lands before them with a ground-shaking thump. His visor flips open and he grins wickedly. “Good to be back.” He unholsters his arc-powered whips, cracks them with gleeful anticipation.

Tony isn’t ready for another battle, but it’s not his choice. Visors flip down, and heavy armored suits are launched through the air like javelins at one another. Arcs of energy ionize the air between them. In a blur of movement, Vanko has Tony immobilized, the arc-whip wrapped around his neck. Another blur sees Rhodey captured the same way.

In the moment of his triumph, Vanko flips up his visor, perhaps to gloat. Tony and Rhodey have the same idea at the same time: both raise their repulsors and aim them at each other. Vanko is puzzled for an instant too long. The repulsors fire, the blowback hitting him in his unprotected face, the shockwave sending Tony and Rhodey flying backwards.

When their systems reboot and they are able to stand again, they see Vanko, lying in the rubble of his armor. Vanko raises his head, looks at Tony as though he can see him through the mask. He grins mirthlessly. “You lose.”

 _I lose_.

Vanko closes his eyes. A red light on his suit starts pulsing and beeping ominously, echoed by similar lights on the drones. Rhodey scans his heads-up display. “All these drones are rigged to blow. We gotta get out of here, man.” He takes off and is lost to sight.

Tony snaps out of his self-pity. “Pepper?”  Jarvis has pinpointed her location at the heart of the Stark Expo, which is littered with the remains of a dozen drones, and he is a streak of light, searching, finding, catching up Pepper in his arms just as explosions start to rock the expo grounds, soaring up and out of harm’s way. Tony finds a suitably high rooftop and lands.

Pepper is evidently insensible to the romance of being rescued by a superhero in the nick of time. As soon as Tony sets her on her feet, she pushes hard at his armored chest with both hands, sending both of them staggering back.”I cannot take this,” she is saying, running both her hands through her disheveled hair in agitation. “I cannot take this, my body literally cannot take this stress, I never know if you’re–”

Momentarily indignant, Tony wrestles off his helmet and gauntlets and tosses them aside. “ _You_ can’t… Look at me! I–”

But then Pepper gasps. “Tony, your neck… your face…”

Pepper is looking at him in horror, and Tony realizes that the fractal rash of the palladium poisoning must now be visible above the neck guard.  ”It’s just a, a symptomatic dermatitis. It’s nothing. It’s the internal organ damage that’s… killing me.”

He’s finally said it.

Pepper says nothing, turns paler and paler. Her hands have dropped nervelessly to her sides. Her eyes are huge and for the first time Tony notices how thin she has become in the last six months.

“The arc reactor has a palladium core. Neutron bombardment causes the core to degrade into my bloodstream. There’s no cure. There’s no substitute. Without the reactor the shrapnel would be in my heart within hours anyway.” Tony searches her face, willing her to understand his actions these past months. “I tried to tell you. I was going to make you an omelette and–”

“How long?” Pepper whispers. “How much longer do you have?”

Tony no longer has access to the heads-up display. “Jarvis?”

“Blood toxicity level at 99%,” Jarvis says calmly.

He looks at her steadily. “Two minutes. More or less.”

Tears overflow from her eyes. “Tony…”

He takes a step towards her, but without warning his legs give out underneath him. “Oh, fuck…” He tries to push Pepper out of the way as he falls — the heavy armor could seriously injure her — but suddenly he is caught by servo-assisted arms. Rhodey, still wearing his armor with the visor up, eases him down so that he is lying, half-reclined against Rhodey’s chest plate.

Tony looks up into his friend’s face. “Just in time.”

“I heard everything,” Rhodey says. His eyes are suspiciously wet. “Damn, Tony. You’re a world-class asshole, you know that?”

Tony can’t help smiling at that, but sobers when he looks back at Pepper, who has come to kneel beside him. He takes her hand. “I’m sorry,” he tells her, making his familiar, wry grimace. “You deserve better.” She bows her head, tears falling steadily. He reaches up with his other hand; Rhodey clasps it strongly in his. His two best friends in all the world hold tight to him, as though to keep him from falling into the unending abyss. Tony closes his eyes. Too soon, he feels his chest tightening up. A stabbing pain that starts in his abdomen rapidly turns into agony everywhere as his tendons pull themselves towards the breaking point.

“Blood toxicity level at 100%. All internal damage irreversible from this point,” Jarvis reports, calm as always.

“Jarvis, it’s time,” Tony manages to say. “Endgame.”

“Engaging ‘endgame’ protocol. Initializing–”

“Jarvis, stop! Tony…” Pepper pleads.

“Pepper.” There is a ghost of Tony’s old sardonic tone. “I don’t want to spend my last minutes puking my guts out, not when I have access to the best morphine money can buy. Jarvis, keep going.”

“Injecting morphine now. It has been an honor to serve you, sir.”

“Woo…” Tony sighs as the morphine floods his system. “You can tell everyone Iron Man went out on a high.” He looks up at Rhodey.  ”Take care of the world for me.” Rhodey nods. Tony looks at Pepper. “I love you.” He knows how unfair it is for him to say this now, but can’t help himself.

And Tony realises all over again just how extraordinary a woman she is, because she smiles through her tears and says, “I will never, ever, ever forgive you for this.” And Tony hears, just as she meant him to, _I love you, too_.

Feeling at peace at last, Tony closes his eyes, mumbling, “Getting sleepy. Talk to you after my nap.”

But as his consciousness slowly fades, and he can no longer hear their breathing or feel their hands gripping his, his last thoughts are not of his best beloved, after all. An image floats in front of him, flickering film footage, a confident gaze, the memory of sound: “What has and always will be my greatest creation… is you.”

Almost, he says, _Sorry, dad_. But doesn’t.

Fade to black.

*

Natasha watches the two data streams for a moment longer, then opens a third channel. Her superior’s one-eyed visage fills the screen. “Stark is down.”

His expression is unreadable. “Damn. I really thought he’d be the one.”

“Do we have a plan B?” she asks.

“Tony Stark _was_ plan B. Go back to the house and collect all of the Stark materials, father and son.  Report back when they’re in our secured facility in New Mexico.  Be ready to travel. Agent Coulson is running down one more possibility, but there aren’t that many geniuses in the world.

I’m thinking, it’s time to retrieve the big guy.”

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading to the end!


End file.
